On 12/09/2009 09:19 PM, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
2009/12/8 Karl Auerbach<karl@cavebear.com>
Rank-order voting systems, such as STV/Instant-runoff or Condorcet, must be centrally cumulated and calculated. Precinct counting, in the traditional sense of coming up with a local winner count that is then forwarded to the canvassing center, does not work. Rather with these methods all that can be done in a distributed manner is to record the preferences, and their order, on each ballot and forward those ballot records off to the canvassing center.
Based on what we've been told it can work here.
I don't know who told you that but it is incorrect. There is no way when using STV/instant-runoff to do a local count, come up with a local winner, and then aggregate those local winners. The levels of automation... No amount of automation makes it possible - it is simply a mathematical fact that the sequence of preferences on each separate ballot needs to be communicated to the central canvassing center so that the rounds of STV/instant-runoff counting can occur.
By-the-way, I certainly do not believe that any choice has been made that ALSs are regional voting centers; that tends to suggest too much that the election is among ALAC members rather than the community of internet users.
You are welcome to your beliefs but I don't think they match the current reality. A decisive majority within At-Large(*) has expressed a preference for the 20-vote option in which most -- but not all -- the voters are ALAC members.
You cite the ALAC as the community of internet users for whom the board seat is being created. This board seat is neither an ALAC nor a *RALO nor an ALS seat; it a seat for the entire community of internet users to fill. Any solution must allow any group of users, whether affiliated with an ALAC/RALO body or not, to nominate, with full equality, candidates onto the ballot and to cast votes. ICANN has a list of over 200,000 names of people who requested to be voters and had their identities successfully authenticated for the year 2000 election. Many are still out there. Are we going to disenfranchise them? We have already seen that open nominations, of any person by any group of persons, can and has worked for elections for the ICANN board. Why fear what has already been done and that has already worked? The ALAC was asked to come up with a proposal; it was hoped that that proposal would be broad minded and inclusive of the entire community of internet users. If the ALAC comes up with a narrow proposal that is little more than a selection of ALAC insiders by ALAC insiders then that proposal ought, and must, be discarded.
According the the whole purpose of At-Large, we are charged with doing our best to support and advance the interests of the "community of Internet users", so your point is moot.
The argument that you are making is that you, or rather the ALAC, knows more about what are the interests and desires of internet users than those users themselves. That kind of paternalism brings to mind King Leopold of Belgium and Queen Victoria of England as they ruled over their 19th century African and Indian colonies with claims that these monarchs were acting, to borrow your words, "to support and advance the interests" of the people who lived there. Those people did not have much opportunity to disagree until the mid 20th century, at which time their cumulative disagreement had catastrophic results. Do we really want the public seat on ICANN's Board of Directors to be chosen via a process riddled with condescension? And I personally have little interest in (yet
again) re-debating the suitability of At-Large for this task.
One might sense that there is an unspoken reason why the nomination and voting is so restricted is that there is a fear by some that the community of internet users might chose its own way rather than the course laid out for it by the ALAC and its component bodies. --karl--